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How does the European Union affect devolution and nationalist conflict in member states? Does the EU reduce the scope of regional self-government or enhance it? Does it promote conflict or cooperation among territorial entities? These are pressing questions in Spanish politics, where devolution has been an important tool for managing nationalist disputes, and for the Basque Country, where protracted and sometimes violent nationalist conflicts persist. Addressing these issues, this book explores prospects for an autonomous Basque role in EU politics; institutional arrangements for autonomous community participation in EU decision making; Basque government alliances with other regions and the EU's supranational bodies; EU incentives for collaboration among Basque and central state authorities; the impact of EU decisions on politically sensitive Basque competencies; and the incidence of EU issues in nationalist disputes. It presents a theoretical framework for analysing the impact of the EU on regional power.
Until relatively recently, democratic Spain has been plagued with serious campaigns of political violence. Between the end of the Francoist regime in 1975 and the announcement of a ceasefire in 2010, the Basque separatist group ETA (Euskadi (e)Ta Askatasuna, Basque Country and Freedom) unquestionably played a central part in this deadly process. In response to ETA’s increasingly violent actions, Spain adopted a determined counter-terrorist stance, establishing one of the most formidable anti-terrorist arsenals among Western democracies. Less well known were the extra-judicial strategies Spain used to eradicate ETA. In the 1980s, initiatives to reopen channels to ETA by the Spanish government were twinned with an astute strategy of enhanced police and judicial co-operation with France on the one hand and a covert campaign of assassination of ETA members on the other. Between 1983 and 1987, mercenaries adopting the pseudonym GAL (Grupos Antiterroristas de Liberación, Antiterrorist Liberation Groups) paid by the Spanish treasury and relying upon national intelligence support were at war with ETA. This establishment of unofficial counter-terrorist squads in a liberal democracy was a blatant detour from legality. More than thirty years later, the campaign of covered-up assassinations continues to grip Spain. Counter-terror by Proxy assesses the political and institutional context of the inception of Spain’s resort to covert and illegal counter-terrorist strategies, which predate the current global fight against terrorism by decades, going on to examine the wider implications of the use of such strategies in a liberal democracy.
Between 1933 and 1940, Manchester received between seven and eight thousand refugees from Fascist Europe. They included Jewish academics expelled from universities in Germany, Austria, Spain and Italy. Around two hundred were children from the Basque country of Spain evacuated to Britain on a temporary basis in 1937 as the fighting of the Spanish Civil War neared their home towns. Most were refugees fleeing Nazi persecution in Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. As much as 95% of the refugees from Nazism were Jews threatened by the increasingly violent anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime. The rest were Communists, Social Democrats, Pacifists, Liberals, Confessional Christians and Sudeten Germans. There have been several valuable studies of the response of the British government to the refugee crisis. This study seeks to assess the responses in one city—Manchester—which had long cultivated an image of itself as a ‘liberal city’. Using documentary and oral sources, including interviews with Manchester refugees, it explores the work of those sectors of local society that took part in the work of rescue: Jewish communal organisations, the Society of Friends, the Rotarians, the University of Manchester, secondary schools in and around Manchester, pacifist bodies, the Roman Catholic Church and industrialists from the Manchester region. The book considers the reasons for their choices to help to assesses their degree of success and the forces which limited their effectiveness.
First published in Spanish in 2001, this book is a study of the development of Spanish national identity (‘the idea of Spain’) from the end of the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. It breaks away from an academic obsession with the sub-nationalism of Catalonia and the Basque Country to examine the predominant form of national consciousness, against which they reacted. The book traces the emergence and evolution of an initial collective identity within the Iberian Peninsula from the Middle Ages to the end of the ancien regime based on the Catholic religion, loyalty to the Crown and Empire. The adaptation of this identity to the modern era, beginning with the Napoleonic Wars and the liberal revolutions, forms the crux of this study. None the less, the book also embraces the highly contested evolution of the national identity in the twentieth century, including both the Civil War and the Franco Dictatorship. It ranges widely over diverse subjects such as representations of the past in Spain, the role of the arts and sciences in creating national consciousness, the impact of religion and Catholic ideas, the use of cultural symbolism, and the significance of contemporary events and political movements.
Spain as an entity and Spanish cultural identity are no less difficult to pin down as the concept of the nation state is simultaneously assailed by political, economic and cultural globalisation and the fragmentation of the state by the demands of its autonomous communities. This book presents a coherent picture of the main narrative, thematic, stylistic and representational trends which have characterised the recent cinema produced in Spain. It seeks to explore the obsession of Spanish cinema with the past and its role as part of a wider recuperation industry. The book examines the varied forms of historical cinema ranging from literary adaptation and period drama to retro thriller and musical. It offers an analysis of other main forms of genre cinema which have dominated the commercial industry and the popular imagination in Spain since the 1970s. The book explores constructions of gender and sexuality across a wide range of examples taken from a variety of contemporary movies. It also focuses on cinema in the autonomous communities, mainly Catalonia and the Basque Country. The period 1993 to 1994 was perhaps one of the most difficult for the film industry in post-Franco Spain, particularly in relation to production totals and audience figures. The setting Institut de Cinema Catalá offered a new forum for debate and inaugurated the first of a number of attempts to define what Catalan film and a Catalan film industry ought to be doing and how Catalan professionals should develop their sector.
policy sought to dampen nationalist tensions by promoting the rights of national and other minority groups in applicant states. It was even used for goals as ambitious as the reunification of Cyprus. Likewise, nationalist conflict in the Balkans has been a major testing ground for the EU’s common foreign and security policy. In this book, I examine the relevance of the EU for nationalist politics in a further case – the impact of the EU’s institutions, practices and policy regimes on politics in the Basque Country. The Basque Country covers just over twenty thousand
As the Basque Country is the most sparsely populated of the historical nationalities, this regional blip mattered little in terms of the overall result of a referendum that covered the whole of Spain, but Basque reluctance nonetheless constituted the most persistent obstacle to the legitimation of the nascent democratic nation state. Prior to Spain’s EU membership, Catalan patriotism rarely translated into a widespread desire for independence, whilst nationalism remained comparatively weak in Galicia. Taking, in turn, each of the historical nationalities granted a
Catalonia, which emerged as an identifiable territory and jurisdiction with its own language in the middle ages (Keating 1996: 115). In the rest of the chapter, I explore the nature of contemporary devolution and its implications for political conflict in the Basque Country, beginning with constitutional arrangements and key rationales for devolution. I then examine evidence that devolution promotes Basque nationalist goals and helps manage diversity within the Basque Country; but also acknowledge shortcomings including the persistence of ETA and deep divisions about
-minute-long narrative. Barry Jordan and Rikki Morgan-Tamosunas suggest that, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Spanish cinema generally represents the past ‘in terms of the domestic, the everyday and focused from the point of view of the individual, the family or other small groups and communities rather than through documentary analyses and broad historical reconstructions of the epic type’. (1998: 39) Vacas is concentrated on the domestic realm, dealing with the lives of two rural families in the Basque country; however, this is placed within a broad, if
With Spain’s return to democracy and the granting of regional autonomy to the Spanish Basque provinces, a sustained political and cultural conflict has ensued about the right of the latter to be considered an independent nation. At the cultural level, discussion of Basque cinema of the democratic era – one of the Basque Country’s most prominent cultural exports in Spain